The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#3651
Richard Becker
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Richard Becker was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, superconductivity, and quantum electrodynamics. Early life Becker was born in Hamburg. His studies in zoology started in 1906 at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1909 under August Weismann. After hearing lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Becker turned his professional interest to physics. He also studied physics under Max Born at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and Max Planck and Albert Einstein at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.
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Robert Andrews Millikan
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.
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Francesco Tricomi
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Francesco Giacomo Tricomi was an Italian mathematician famous for his studies on mixed type partial differential equations. He was also the author of a book on integral equations. Biography Tricomi was born in Naples. He first enrolled in the University of Bologna, where he took chemistry courses. However, Tricomi realized that he preferred physics rather than chemistry; he moved to the University of Naples in 1915. He graduated at the University of Naples in 1918 and later was assistant to Francesco Severi, first in Padua and then in Rome. Later he was professor at Turin, called by Giuseppe...
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Frank Oppenheimer
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Frank Friedman Oppenheimer was an American particle physicist, cattle rancher, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment. After the war, Oppenheimer's earlier involvement with the American Communist Party placed him under scrutiny, and he resigned from his physics position at the University of Minnesota. Oppenheimer...
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Seth Neddermeyer
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Seth Henry Neddermeyer was an American physicist who co-discovered the muon, and later championed the implosion-type nuclear weapon while working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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Cyrus Levinthal
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Levinthal graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from University of California, Berkeley and taught physics at the University of Michigan before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1957. In 1968 he joined Columbia University as the Chairman and from 1969 Professor of the newly established Department of Biological Sciences, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in 1990. While at MIT Levinthal made significant discoveries in molecular genetics relating to the mechanisms of DNA replication, the relationship between genes and proteins, and the nature of messenger RNA.
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Thomas A. Mutch
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Thomas A. Mutch was an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was a professor at Brown University from 1960 until his death. He disappeared during descent from Mount Nun in the Kashmir Himalayas.
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Tom W. Bonner
1910 - 1961 (51 years)
Tom Wilkerson Bonner was an American experimental physicist who developed important instruments and techniques for neutron physics and nuclear physics . Biography Bonner earned his bachelor's degree in physics from SMU in 1931 and his PhD from Rice University in 1934. In 1934–1936, he was a National Research Council fellow at Caltech. At Rice University, he became an instructor in 1936, a professor in 1945, and chair of the physics department in 1947. In the academic year 1938–1939, he was a Guggenheim fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he did radar research at the MIT Radiation Lab.
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Harry O. Wood
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Harry Oscar Wood was an American seismologist who made several significant contributions in the field of seismology in the early twentieth-century. Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and his career took a change of direction into the field of seismology. In the 1920s he co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes. In 1931 Wood, along with another seismologist, redeveloped and updated the Mercalli intensity scale, a seismic int...
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Ilya Lifshitz
1916 - 1982 (66 years)
Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz was a leading Soviet theoretical physicist, brother of Evgeny Lifshitz. He is known for his works in solid-state physics, electron theory of metals, disordered systems, and the theory of polymers.
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Sydney Chapman
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Sydney Chapman was a British mathematician and geophysicist. His work on the kinetic theory of gases, solar-terrestrial physics, and the Earth's ozone layer has inspired a broad range of research over many decades.
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Carl Eckart
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Carl Henry Eckart was an American physicist, physical oceanographer, geophysicist, and administrator. He co-developed the Wigner–Eckart theorem and is also known for the Eckart conditions in quantum mechanics, and the Eckart–Young theorem in linear algebra.
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Frank C. Hoyt
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Frank Clark Hoyt was an American physicist, regarded as one of the first theoretical physicists to come from the USA in the period that quantum mechanics was being developed. Biography He was born to Carrie Louise Stokes and Louis Phelps Hoyt, an organist. He went to Harvard School for Boys. At school, his primary interest was literature - he wanted to study Greek - but the path to science developed in his final year after taking chemistry and physics courses. He enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, starting in chemical engineering, moving towards pure chemistry before being influenced by his teachers towards physics.
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William Arnold Anthony
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
William Arnold Anthony was a U.S. physicist. Biography Anthony was born in Coventry, Rhode Island. He was educated at the Yale Scientific School and graduated in 1860. Between 1857 and 1860 he was director of a grade school in Crompton, Rhode Island. From 1860 to 1861 he taught natural sciences at the Providence Conference Seminary, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, followed by a teaching position at the Delaware Literary Institute in Franklin, New York until 1867. That year he became professor of physics and chemistry at the Antioch College, where he stayed until 1870. After a short time teachi...
Go to Profile#3666
Arthur Gordon Webster
1863 - 1923 (60 years)
Arthur Gordon Webster was an American physicist who founded the American Physical Society. Biography Webster was born on November 28, 1863, at Brookline, Massachusetts, to William Edward Webster and Mary Shannon Davis. On October 8, 1889, he married Elizabeth Munroe Townsend, daughter of Captain Robert Townsend and Harriett Munro of Albany, New York.
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Carolyn Parker
1917 - 1966 (49 years)
Carolyn Beatrice Parker was a physicist who worked from 1943 to 1947 on the Dayton Project, the polonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project. She was one of a small number of African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project. She then became an assistant professor in physics at Fisk University.
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John F. Mustard
John F. Mustard is a planetary scientist and professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University. He specializes in using remote sensing and spectroscopy technology to examine and analyze planetary bodies. Mustard investigates the formation and evolution of rocky planets such as Mars, Mercury, the Moon and the Earth.
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Lewi Tonks
1897 - 1971 (74 years)
Lewi Tonks was an American quantum physicist noted for his discovery of the Tonks–Girardeau gas. Tonks was employed by General Electric for most of his working life, researching microwaves and ferromagnetism. He worked under Irving Langmuir on plasma physics, with a special interest in ball lightning, nuclear fusion, tungsten filament light bulbs, and lasers.
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Keith Stewartson
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Keith Stewartson was an English mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. Early life The youngest of three children, Stewartson was born to an English baker in 1925. He was raised in Billingham, County Durham, where he attended Stockton Secondary School, and went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1942. He won the Drury Prize in 1943 for his work in Mathematical Tripos.
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Cherry Logan Emerson
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Cherry Logan Emerson, Sr. was an American engineer and academic administrator. Education Emerson graduated from Georgia Tech with two bachelor's degrees: one in mechanical engineering and one in electrical engineering . He was also a charter member of Georgia Tech's ANAK Society, Editor-in-Chief of the Blueprint, and a brother of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
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Richard C. Tolman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Richard Chace Tolman was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who made many contributions to statistical mechanics. He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity. He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology .
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Sterling Howard Emerson
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Sterling Howard Emerson was an American geneticist. Emerson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. Life Sterling Howard Emerson was born on October 29, 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Rollins Adams Emerson and Harriet Hardin. Emerson was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1922, and admitted as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1928. Emerson was the professor of genetics at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1971. Emerson died on May 2, 1988, in Altadena, California.
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Carleton C. Murdock
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Carleton Chase Murdock was an American physicist, teaching and researching primarily at Cornell University. He served as Dean of University Faculty from 1945 to 1951. Within the field of physics, he was known for research in the field of crystal structures and X-ray diffractions. During academic year 1926-27, Murdock also conducted research at the Royal Institute’s Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London, England.
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H. J. Ryser
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Herbert John Ryser was a professor of mathematics, widely regarded as one of the major figures in combinatorics in the 20th century. He is the namesake of the Bruck–Ryser–Chowla theorem, Ryser's formula for the computation of the permanent of a matrix, and Ryser's conjecture.
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Neal H. Williams
1870 - 1956 (86 years)
Neal Hooker Williams was a physicist notable for the very first spectroscopic measurements at microwave frequencies. He carried this out with a magnetron and investigated the spectrum of gaseous ammonia together with his student Claud E. Cleeton. This formed the groundwork for the later inventions of the radar and the gas laser.
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Gordon Alles
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Gordon A. Alles , was an American chemist and pharmacologist who did extensive research on the isolation and properties of insulin for the treatment of diabetics. He is also credited with discovering and publishing the physiological effects of amphetamine and methylenedioxyamphetamine . He is the first person to have prepared amphetamine sulfate, although not the amphetamine molecule. Alles first reported the physiological properties of amphetamine as a synthetic analog of ephedrine, and therefore received credit for this discovery. He enjoyed large royalties from Smith, Kline & French because he sold his patent rights for amphetamine to the company and it enjoyed large sales.
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Edward Skinner King
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Edward Skinner King was an American astronomer. In 1887 he graduated from Hamilton College and joined the staff of the Harvard Observatory, where he supervised the photographic imaging and related work. He became a pioneer and authority on the process of photographic photometry. In 1912 he noticed that some types of films appeared to perform better during the winter months, which led to the use of the so-called "cold camera" where the temperature is lowered to around -40 °C. From 1926 until his death he was the Phillips Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University.
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Arnold Sommerfeld
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretical physics. He served as doctoral supervisor and postdoc supervisor to seven Nobel Prize winners and supervised at least 30 other famous physicists and chemists. Only J. J. Thomson's record of mentorship offers a comparable list of high-achieving students.
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Jonathan Pearse
#3681
Samuel Jackson Barnett
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Samuel Jackson Barnett was an American physicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Barnett was born in Woodson County, Kansas, the son of a minister. In 1894, he received a B.A. in physics from the University of Denver and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1898. From 1898 to 1918 he taught at several universities: Colorado College, Stanford University, Tulane University, and Ohio State University. In 1903 he published his book Elements of Electromagnetic Theory, which he dedicated to his friend Professor Francis H. Smith at the University of Vir...
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Pol Duwez
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Pol Duwez was a Belgian-born materials scientist. While working at Caltech in 1960, he first introduced metallic glasseses made through rapid liquid cooling using a technique known as splat quenching.
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Rolla C. Carpenter
1852 - 1919 (67 years)
Rolla Clinton Carpenter C.E. M.M.E. LL.D. was an American engineer, academic, and writer. Carpenter was born in Orion , Michigan. He earned a B.S. in 1873 from Michigan State Agricultural College and later received additional bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan in 1875. From 1875 to 1890 he was professor of mathematics and civil engineering in the Michigan State Agricultural College; while there, he designed and supervised much of the construction at the young school. In 1887, he and Professor William J. Beal laid out "Collegeville", the first neighborhood in what...
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Arnold Beckman
1900 - 2004 (104 years)
Arnold Orville Beckman was an American chemist, inventor, investor, and philanthropist. While a professor at California Institute of Technology, he founded Beckman Instruments based on his 1934 invention of the pH meter, a device for measuring acidity , later considered to have "revolutionized the study of chemistry and biology". He also developed the DU spectrophotometer, "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience". Beckman funded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first silicon transistor company in California, thus giving rise to Silicon Valley.
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Alex Rogers
Alex D. Rogers is professor of conservation biology and fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford. External links Alex Rogers talking at the World Economic Forum on Preserving Ocean Ecosystems.
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David Schenk Jacobus
1862 - 1955 (93 years)
David Schenk Jacobus was an American mechanical engineer, head of the Engineering Department of Babcock & Wilcox, inventor and educator, who served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1916–17.
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Harry Pollard
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Harry Pollard was an American mathematician. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1942 under the supervision of David Widder. He then taught at Cornell University, and was Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University from 1961 until his death in 1985. He is known for his work on celestial mechanics, orthogonal polynomials and the n-body problem as well as for the several textbooks he authored or co-authored. In the theory of Orthogonal polynomials, Pollard solved a conjecture of Antoni Zygmund norms for the Legendre polynomials and Jacobi polynomials in a series of three papers in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
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Alfred Sturtevant
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist. Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1911. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor. On February 13, 1968, Sturtevant received the 1967 National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
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Henry G. Booker
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Henry George Booker was an Anglo-American physicist and electrical engineer. Booker was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was head of panel on stratospheric pollution. He was a head of the Maths Group at Worth focused on radio propagation. He was director of the Cornell University’s school of electrical engineering, and the founder of department of electrical engineering and computer science at University of California, San Diego. The New York Times called Booker "worldwide authority on radio wave propagation", as well as "one of the world's foremost authorities on the propag...
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George O. Abell
1927 - 1983 (56 years)
George Ogden Abell was an American educator. Teaching at UCLA, priorly he worked as a research astronomer, administrator, as a popularizer of science and of education, and as a skeptic. He earned his B.S. in 1951, his M.S. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1957, all from the California Institute of Technology. He was a Ph.D. student under Donald Osterbrock. His astronomical career began as a tour guide at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Abell made great contributions to astronomical knowledge which resulted from his work during and after the National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, especially concerning clusters of galaxies and planetary nebulae.
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Edgar Lipworth
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Edgar Lipworth was an American physicist, specializing "in research in molecular and atomic beams, nuclear physics, lasers and the symmetry of physical laws under time reversal." Born and educated in England, Edgar Lipworth worked from 1944 to 1946 as a civilian research assistant on radar for the Air Ministry. After graduating with a BA from the University of Manchester in 1947, he became a graduate student in physics at Manhattan's Columbia University. There he obtained his PhD with advisor Willis Lamb with a dissertation on measurement of the Lamb shift in singly ionized helium. From 1953 to 1954 Lipworth held a fellowship with RCA.
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Magnus Maclean
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Prof Magnus Maclean FRSE MIEE MICE LLD was an electrical engineer who assisted Lord Kelvin in his electrical experiments and later became Professor of Electrical Engineering in Glasgow . The Magnus Maclean Memorial Prize given to students of electrical engineering is named in his honour. A native speaker of Scottish Gaelic, he also lectured in Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow, delivering the MacCallum lectures, in English between 1901 and 1093. These lectures constituted the first official lectures in Celtic studies at the University.
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John F. Benton
1931 - 1988 (57 years)
John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Asa S. Knowles
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Asa Smallidge Knowles was the ninth President of the University of Toledo and the third President of Northeastern University. A graduate of Thayer Academy, Knowles went on to earn his AB from Bowdoin College in 1930 and his MA from Boston University a few years later. Knowles began his teaching career at Northeastern, leaving for several years to attend several administrative positions at the University of Rhode Island, the Associated Colleges of Upper New York , Cornell University , and the University of Toledo. During his time as president of Northeastern, lasting from 1959 to 1975, he exp...
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Allan C. G. Mitchell
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Allan Charles Gray Mitchell was an American physicist. He was a professor and head of the Indiana University Bloomington department of physics. Early life and education Mitchell was born in 1902, the son of Milly Gray and astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. He earned a master of arts in physics from University of Virginia in 1924. He completed his doctorate in physical chemistry at California Institute of Technology from 1924 to 1927. His advisor was Richard C. Tolman. He completed postdoctorate work in physics with James Franck and Arnold Sommerfeld.
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Alexander Vyssotsky
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Vyssotsky was a Russian-American astronomer. Born in Moscow, in 1923 he moved to the United States, where he eventually became professor at the University of Virginia and vice-president of the American Astronomical Society.
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Michel G. Malti
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Michel George Malti was an American electrical engineer, known for his work in circuit analysis. He was born in Deir el Qamar, in modern-day Lebanon and died in Miami, Florida. He graduated from the Syrian Protestant college and from Georgia Tech , before joining Cornell University as an instructor and student, earning a M.Sc. and Ph.D. , all degrees in electrical engineering.
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Paul Sophus Epstein
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Paul Sophus Epstein was a Russian-American mathematical physicist. He was known for his contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, part of a group that included Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski, Thomson, Rutherford, Sommerfeld, Röntgen, von Laue, Bohr, de Broglie, Ehrenfest and Schwarzschild.
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William Shockley
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American inventor, physicist, and eugenicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
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Paul Rudolph
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Paul Rudolph was a German physicist who designed the first anastigmatic lens while working for Carl Zeiss. After World War I, he joined the Hugo Meyer optical company, where he designed most of their cine lenses.
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